What is Gladstone trying to tell us? Through the matted undergrowth of his prose, with its vatic pronouncements, its interminable subordinate clauses, its ponderous hesitations and protestations,...
Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most...
Felix Mendelssohn, named for happiness, and privileged from birth, was one of the most musical men who has ever lived. He could paint, draw and write almost as well as he could compose. He read...
When I finished this book I was left wondering why H.L.A. Hart hadn’t destroyed his diaries before he died. Perhaps modesty made him think that no one would want to write about him –...
For a generation after the Second World War it was difficult to discuss one’s German-Jewish origins or the Holocaust without embarrassment. Even children whose families had been murdered in...
As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to...
A dictionary is, first and foremost, a practical resource; its usability when subjected to a variety of everyday scholarly demands must be the chief test of its worth. But a work on the scale of
3 January. Alan Bates dies on 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard...
Hanif Kureishi’s father, like many fathers, hated his job (he was a clerk at the Pakistani Embassy in London). But unlike many fathers, he tried in his spare time to forge for himself an...
The first edition of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More sold out within three weeks; a second and third followed rapidly. ‘Holy Hannah’, as Horace Walpole called her...
Rudolph Valentino, according to his first-rate biographer, Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly...
According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he...
Deutscher’s Trotsky was thought by two generations – his own and its successor – to be one of the great works of biography. The first volume emerged in 1954, soon after the...
‘People of all generations just stood around, uncertain of what to do next … It sort of petered out.’ Bruce Laughton’s William Coldstream is an attempt, 17 years on, to...
When Thackeray died in 1863 his eldest daughter, Anny, who was 26, was left not just with a famous name and a sum of money but with an established place in London literary life. Affectionate and...
Ireland has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in...
If the past is another country where they do things differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to...
Stanley Milgram’s series of experiments to find out how far individuals would go to obey authority are legendary. Conducted in New Haven, Connecticut in 1961, they have been cited in...